climb every mountain!

Or at least, one mountain, starting with what's nearby. That's what we did on Saturday.

Drew is in town: he arrived this weekend as the advance party for the Palo Alto visit to Santa Barbara (Kathy and Bill arrive midweek). We're excited to have someone else in the house to palm the dishwashing off on. Also he's a nice guy. So after he got into town around 2 in the afternoon on Saturday, having gotten up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus down to our part of CA, we took him on a 3 hour hike up a mountain. To be fair, we drove halfway up the mountain to the trail entrance, but it was quite a walk anyway.

The inspiration for this adventure was Amberjae, a friend of mine from UCSB who called in the morning and said "let's go for a hike!" She had no idea what she was getting herself into. She had brought with her a friend of a friend (she was friendsitting for the day), Nick, a German student/triathlete, whose only request was for a 'really tall mountain'. Apparently we were destined for a workout.

Anyway, here are the visual highlights:

Amberjae, who positively skipped up the mountain, expressing her glee at not having to do that anymore.

Drew and Nick, our random German.

Me and Joey, with a view of Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands in the background.

The males.

The view from Overlook Point. The city of Santa Barbara is in the midground, stretching across the valley that runs from right to left of the picture, ending in a cluster at the coast. The island in the distance is Santa Cruz, the biggest of the Channel Islands, which is about the size of Tobago.

More tuna fun

Here's the other thing Danielle whipped up with the delicious tuna from the previous post ... pepper crusted tuna salad with avocado and beets. The farmer's market lettuce mix is great fun, fortunately this time we didn't get any little bits that passed the "that's actually just a weed" threshold.

 

Sushi night

This all started when I was flipping through the paper and saw an ad. "Fresh off the Boat!" it proclaimed, Sushi grade tuna for $3 a pound off the back of a boat in Ventura harbor. Sounds amazing right? The only catch was, you have to buy the whole fish (and pay in cash). I jokingly said to Danielle, "Hey, you want to buy a fish on Saturday?" After these several years, you'd think I'd have learned by now ... there are certain kinds of crazy ideas she'll jump all over, even if I think I'm joking.

So, we did a little research and learned that tuna are really big. Like up to 1000 pounds big for certain kinds. I knew they were large from the Outer Bay tank at the Monterrey Aquarium (those are yellowfin tuna), but that's big. Some smaller varieties like Albacore would be more like 100 pounds, but still that's a lot of fish. So we started thinking about whether anyone we knew might want a 40 pound side of fish, but then the timing just didn't work out this weekend for the 25-mile trip to Ventura.

It was looking like we'd have to wait until Spring term to try all those tuna recipes we'd been looking up (had to make plans for 40 pounds of fish after all). But then, out of the blue(fin), a beautiful tuna steak landed in our lap ... Dinah (one of Danielle's classmates) and Win gave us a steak from the very same boat for helping put together a party at their place over the weekend (more on that some other time). Also, these wise locals informed us, they'll sell you steaks or fillets for $6 a pound. If only they'd mentioned that in the ad, we wound't have spent an evening trying to figure out what we might do with a 100 pound fish. Well, here's the sushi we made last night from this delicious tuna:

 

 

 

For those of you keeping score at home, the avocados are from our tree, the carrots and other veggies from the farmer's market, and the delicious Meridian Chardonay is also from Santa Barbara County. Eating good and local! Next time, we're totally getting American made wasabi ... the Japanese tube we had was hot, like exploding mosquito hot.

Anyway, for any locals who might want more info, the boat is right by Andria's seafood restaurant (which is also supposed to be good) in the Ventura harbor. Don't know if they sell every weekend or not, but they also had Mahi Mahi and Opah.

grad student blues, and avocados

Apparently, graduate student lives can be, well, too exciting in an incredibly boring way around the end of term. This week, I had 3 papers due, which means I spent a lot of time in a room that looked like this:


It may not seem particularly stimulating, but I can assure you that the adrenaline was pumping around 4.45 on Friday afternoon. The good news is that I got them done (more or less) on time; the bad news is that as a result, I don't really have very much else to report. But if you'd like to hear my thoughts on various aspects of Governance for Sustainable Development, I can give you an earful.

This weekend we took advantage of a brief 'Indian Summer' (which is what we usually call 'normal weather' in Santa Barbara) to borrow our neighbour's fruit picker and explore the possibilities of the trees in the back yard of our complex. The endeavor was quite fruitful. I know, that was a horrific pun. We'll pretend that it's Joey's fault that I now make jokes like that fairly often. Anyhoo, we're excited about the bounty we ended up with - apparently our immediate future is full of avocados and oranges.



And that, more or less, is the word on the Coast Crew for the time being.